Toward an Explanation of Near-DeathPhenomena1 , 2

Michael GrossoDepartment of PhilosophyJersey City State College

INTRODUCTION

The human conception of death has undergone radical changeswith the gradual decline and repression of archaic modes of thought.Early man lived in a world under the sway of the magical omnipo-tence of thought; moreover, the modern, post-renaissance man'snarrow and mechanized sense of self was unknown to the first peoplein the childhood of the human race. Orthodox science's view ofdeath is not the view of primitives or of people of the great religioustraditions. To the typical scientist, consciousness is the by-product ofbrain events and perishes with the body. Nevertheless, let us bracketthis dogma for a moment and ask: Is death really the extinction ofhuman personality or does it permit some continuity of conscious-ness? One purpose of what follows is to insist that this deserves toremain an open question, for the evidence suggesting survival isneither so compelling nor the dogmas which deny it so commandingthat one can judge on the issue with much confidence.

A complex set of phenomena associated with near-death statesseems at first glance to clash with the scientifically orthodox view ofdeath as extinction. Scientists investigating these phenomena refer tothem collectively as near-death experiences (NDEs). I want, first, tocall the reader's attention to certain features of these experienceswhich demand explanation; we will then look at some of the ex-planations that have already been proposed and try to evaluate themimpartially. At the very least, classic NDEs suggest some ratherbizarre capabilities of the human mind; on that score alone theydeserve to be studied by students of human behavior. On the otherhand, they may turn out to be the foothills of a new frontier ofknowledge.

Anabiosis-The Journal for Near-Death Studies

WHAT NEEDS TO BE EXPLAINED?

Two Types of Near-Death Experience

There are two types of NDE. The first consists of deathbedvisions. Here the subject typically is ill, usually bedridden, andsuddenly at the hour of death experiences a vision. He often "sees"the apparition of a deceased relative or friend. The experience maybe accompanied by a remarkable elevation of mood. The dyingperson is frequently in a state of clear, wakeful consciousness, andthe apparition seems to inhabit, or temporarily manifest in, thepublic space continuous with the patient. Early collections of thesecases were compiled and studied by Bozzano (1906, 1923), Hyslop(1908), and Barrett (1926). More recently, Osis (1961) took up thequestion of deathbed visions, and Osis and Haraldsson (1977a, 1977b)pursued the problem using a cross-cultural approach.

In the second type of NDE a person, not necessarily ill, is suddenlybrought into a state on the verge of physical death. This might arisefrom cardiac arrest, near drowning, mountain-climbing falls, suicideattempts, auto accidents, or other life-threatening incidents. Moody(1975) has constructed a model of this type of near-death experience.The main common elements in the experience are ineffability,feelings of peace and quiet, entering a dark tunnel, being out of thebody, .meeting with others, encountering a being of light, reaching aborder or limit, and undergoing changes in outlook and attitude. Thesubsequent work of Ring (1980) largely supports the informalstudies of Moody (1975, 1977). Ring describes five stages of a"prototypical" core experience: euphoric affect, an out-of-bodystate, entering darkness, seeing an unearthly world of light, andentering into that world of light. These stages seem like parts of anordered and developing sequence in which subjects reach the finalstages with decreasing frequency. At any one of these stages theremight occur what Ring calls a "decisional process." The person"decides" to return to life. However, many cases involve anger orregret over being brought back to life; the process appears to be quiteautomatic. As Ring points out, we seem to be observing a proto-typical or suprapersonal mechanism which manifests in a fragmentaryway through a spectrum of personalities.

In addition to the five stages and the decisional process, Ring'scases include other features of classic near-death experiences such asmeeting with others, panoramic memory, and so forth. On thewhole, features of the two types of NDE, deathbed visions and close-call or resuscitation cases, are not inconsistent.

In a large number of the resuscitation cases the patient temporarily

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Toward an Explanation of Near-Death Phenomena

ceases to display any vital signs. But can we say that such patientswere "really" dead? The problem is that during the period of thepatient's "death," the organism was still capable of being restored tovital functioning. But we cannot say this of the body of someonewho has died "permanently"; so in this sense the resuscitated patientwas clearly not dead. On the other hand, the patient, having tempo-rarily lost all vital functioning, would in the great majority of caseshave soon joined the ranks of the permanently and irrevocably deadhad it not been for the intervention of on-the-scene medical workers.In this sense, one is tempted to say that the resuscitated patientreally was dead.

The fact that resuscitated patients would, without medical inter-vention, have died seems rather difficult to reconcile with theirhaving any experience whatsoever. Suppose one dies in the sense that,apart from resuscitation procedures, one would remain irreversiblydead. Once that process has begun, what biological function can weascribe to having any experiences-no less the extraordinary near-death experiences? As long as the organism is functioning vitally,however imminent death may be, it seems less surprising that thebrain might throw off some adaptive phenomena-phantasms,memories, deliria. But once the first step of the irreversible is takenand the brain is rapidly depleting its last store of oxygen and glucose,it seems like an overstated and perfunctory gesture to go on pro-ducing such elaborate and useless epiphenomena.

THREE CLASSES OF PUZZLING EFFECTS

In particular, there are three components of NDEs which have tobe explained: (a) the consistency and universality which they gen-erally display, (b) their paranormal (psi) aspects, and (c) their powerto modify attitudes and behavior.

The Consistency and Universality of NDEs

For the phenomenologist or student of the natural history of themind, the NDE appears as a distinctive finding; a coherent, spon-taneous psychic mechanism. The firsthand accounts arise from themost diverse sources-religious believers and atheists, the educatedand the ignorant; from old and young, saint and sinner, man andwoman. In case after case the same message, though coded different-ly and in accents and styles that vary, seems to emanate from a uni-versal stratum of consciousness. What appears is a cross-culturalpattern of phenomena that is filtered down and personalized by theexperient's inherited cultural constructs. For example, as Osis and

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Haraldsson (1977a, 1977b) and Ring (1980) have found, religiousbeliefs influence the interpretation, not the content of the experi-ence. Lundahl (in press) has studied near-death experiences ofMormons, some of which date back a hundred years, and found thecore phenomena I have described above. Crookall (1965) has col-lected large numbers of cases, rich in descriptive detail, which againreinforce the reality of the core phenomena. For further historicalstudies supporting the consistency and universality of the corephenomena, see Audette (in press) and Rogo (1979).

Moreover, there seem to be aspects of the NDE which manifest incontexts which are not directly related to pathology or life-threateningsituations: for instance, in dreams (Russell, 1965), mystical experi-ences (Noyes, 1971), esoteric death-training techniques (Evans-Wentz,1957), psychedelic therapy with terminal patients (Grof and Halifax,1977), and mystery cults of antiquity (Grosso, 1979). Needless tosay, more work needs to be done to substantiate the claim of uni-versality; nevertheless, the widespread pattern of the phenomenaunder examination calls for an explanation.

The Paranormal Aspects of NDEs

The second component that needs explanation is the paranormalmaterial sometimes reported in NDEs. Most of this material is anec-dotal, but the cumulative effect strongly suggests that there is somesubstance to the psi-dimension of these experiences. Further supportcomes from the evidence that altered states of consciousness are psi-conducive (see, e.g., Honorton, 1977). This point is important be-cause near-death situations generate altered states of consciousness.

The psi-components lend weight to the meaningful and consistentfeatures of NDEs in two ways. First, they indicate that NDEs expressmore than just wish-fulfillment or self-serving fantasy. To the extentthat such experiences contain elements of genuine psi, they areoriented toward objective reality. Secondly, psi in general suggeststhe existence of an alternate, nonsensory reality-a reality whichcould be construed in terms relevant to post-mortem states. Thissecond point is of course controversial. But the facts about psi persistin being inexplicable in terms of physical theory (Beloff, 1980); theyseem to imply the existence of an autonomous psychological orderof reality. This should be kept in mind in trying to understand thewider implications of near-death phenomena.

Of course, there is nothing to prevent us from assuming that anypsi components found in NDEs result from delusive expectations andirrational desires. This psi-dependent Freudian interpretation will

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Toward an Explanation of Near-Death Phenomena

have to be considered later. For now let us briefly examine some ofthe types of ostensible ND-related psi effects, for it is these effectswhich sharpen the challenge of near-death phenomena.

Psi effects related to deathbed visions. In so-called "Peak in Darien"cases, the dying person sees the apparition of a person not known bythe former to be deceased. If this is what it appears to be, we coulddescribe it as a kind of transworld ESP. There are a few reports(Barrett, 1926, Bozzano, 1906) of cases in which nobody presentwas aware that the person whose apparition was seen was in factdead, thus ruling out telepathy from people at the dying person'sbedside. Cases of this type are rare, but this is not surprising in viewof the peculiar combination of factors necessary to produce them.Unfortunately, most of the Peak in Darien cases derive from theolder literature, though Lundahl (in press) and Ring (1980, p. 208)offer some current illustrations. The impersonal nature of dying inmodern hospitals may account for the dearth of recent examples.

Psi effects related to resuscitation cases. In resuscitation cases, orother types of near-death encounters, the dominant psi componentcomes in the form of ostensibly veridical out-of-body experiences(OBEs). Not all OBEs, of course contain psi components. Yet thereseems to be an almost typical report o a classic OB situation inwhich a person near death finds himself located outside his body andable to observe in detail events occurring in neighboring regions of

space. Cases such as this, assuming they can be corroborated, strong-ly suggest paranormal OB perception, though in any single instancead hoc normal explanations could be invoked. In order to substan-tiate such claims of ND-related paranormal OB perception, it will benecessary in the future to obtain the cooperation of medical profes-sionals. Obviously this will not be an easy task, given the stringentduties of physicians and nurses on the job. Yet much could belearned if psi investigation could be routinely incorporated into cer-tain medical settings where one might suppose a gold mine of usefuldata awaits exploration.

As far as I know, Michael Sabom, a cardiologist working at theEmory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, is the first physi-cian actively concerned with investigating the paranormal elementsof NDEs. As an example 3 of an OBE with a possible psi component,Sabom has described the case of a patient anesthetized for open-heart surgery who, after a period of blackout (called "entering thedarkness" by Ring and "the tunnel" by Moody and Crookall), sud-denly became aware of his body being operated on. The patient'sface was covered by a sheet, yet he claimed to have observed the

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operation from a point out of and above his body, as if he wereanother person, an unconcerned observer. The patient described howthe "shining metal" of the knife cut through his chest, the syringesinserted on each side of his heart, and the injection into it. Hewatched a surgeon cut off bits of his heart, poke around some veinsand arteries, and then discuss with the other doctors where the nextbypass was to be made. He observed a doctor wearing blood-stainedwhite shoes, another with a blood clot in the fingernail of hisright hand.

Two observations particularly struck Sabom from his perspectiveas a cardiologist. The patient expressed surprise at the large size andactual location of his heart; he compared its shape to the continentof Africa. According to Sabom, this is an apt comparison. The pa-tient also said that part of his heart had a lighter color than the nor-mal myocardial tissue; according to Sabom, discoloration would havemarked the site of the patient's previous heart attack.

Such apparently veridical OBEs need to be explained; they lendsome weight to the unverifiable visionary claims of near-death ordying percipients. For, if one aspect of the NDE is verifiable while atthe same time providing testimony for an extraphysical factor, thenit seems less implausible to ascribe ultimately verifiable reality to therest of the experience.

There are also reports of OBEs in deathbed vision cases. But herethe apparent separation process may be more gradual. Osis andHaraldsson (1977b, p. 129) write: "While still functioning normally,the patient's consciousness might be gradually disengaging itself fromthe ailing body." And in Barrett's (1926) early study, witnesses arecited who have "seen" dying persons' "doubles" splitting off and

disappearing at the moment of death. These observations might ex-plain why terminal patients often experience a lessening of pain anddiscomfort shortly before they die.

The dying patient may only be approaching the state that theresuscitated patient has already entered; yet there still seem to begradations of entering more deeply into the NDE, as the work of

Ring (1980) shows. Obviously, more has to be done on this "stage ofentry" idea. One approach might be to obtain information on the

dreams and mentations of people just prior to their sudden death oronset of fatal illness. For example, I have recorded several cases of

individuals who, a day or so before a sudden fatal illness, unac-countably started to talk about their deceased relatives, had slips ofthe tongue suggesting subconscious preoccupation with them, spon-taneously put their affairs in order, settled accounts, etc., as if inpreparation for death.

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Toward an Explanation of Near-Death Phenomena

Psychokinetic phenomena have also been reported in the contextof death and dying. Bozzano (1948) made a study of PK events inconjunction with the time of death. Osis and Haraldsson (1977b, p.42) referred to a few tantalizing incidents-for example, the stoppingof clocks belonging to two of Thomas Alva Edison's associates andalso of his own clock within moments of his death. And L. E. Rhine(1970, pp. 330-334) cites several interesting cases of PK effectsassociated with the dying and the dead, taken from her collection ofspontaneous cases on file at the Institute for Parapsychology.

Finally, as further evidence bearing on the psi-conducive nature ofdeath and dying, there is the S.P.R. Census of Hallucinations(Sidgwick and Committee, 1894, p. 393), which showed that veridi-cal apparitions "which coincide in time with the death of the personseen"-i.e., the "agent"-are more numerous than apparitions in anyother category.

Changes in Outlook and Behavior

We observe in both types of NDEs a modification of outlook,affective states, values, and goals. This constitutes the third compo-nent of these experiences that calls for explanation. In the deathbedcases such effects are obviously of short duration because the patientdies shortly after the experience. Nevertheless, Osis and Haraldsson(1977a, 1977b) found cases of near-death rise of mood that couldnot be explained by medical factors. Sabom (1980) did follow-upstudies six months after his patients' experiences and found that themodification effects persisted. Generally, it would appear that thenear-death syndrome produces beneficial effects-in some respectsresembling religious conversion. Chief among these effects is the re-duction or elimination of the fear of death and alterations in outlookconcerning the meaning of life and the nature of reality. The truebenefits of these transformative experiences may, however, beblocked because of the confusion they elicit; patients are oftenunable to share their experiences and even fear for their sanity.Hopefully, with a better understanding of these phenomena themedical establishment will learn to enhance their utility. In sum,such near-death enhancement effects need to be explained becausetheir adaptive potential seems incongruous with thinking of them asillusory or pathological.

GENERAL REMARKS ON EXPLAINING NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

For an explanation of the NDE to work, it must address itself to

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Anabiosis-The Journal for Near-Death Studies

all three components of the phenomenon: its universality and consis-tency; its paranormal dimension; and its transformative effects,which are usually of a positive nature. It is the unique combinationof these components which makes it a challenging matter to explainthe NDE. Obviously, the mere fact that a phenomenon is universaland consistent in itself need not impress us; drunkards of all culturesand personality types, for example, consistently have the same sortof experiences-say, delirium tremens. Consistency and universalityhere is no bar against seeing the drunkard's experience as delusory.But it is a different matter with near-death experiences, for we donot expect delusory experiences to produce momentous changes inpersonality or to involve extensions of normal human capabilities.

Methods of Gathering Data

Scientific research in NDEs is still in its infancy. Most of the workso far has consisted of collecting reports unsystematically from pre-selected sources. Little or no medical and psychological data were in-cluded in the early collections of cases. The first systematic approachwas that of Osis (1961), who used modern samping techniques andcomputer analyses to sort out the patterns in his data. The recentwork of Sabom (1980; Sabom and Kreutziger, 1978) and Ring(1980) has rightly stressed the importance of prospective research.Respondents were selected on the basis of undergoing a near-deathevent, not necessarily a near-death experience. Both researchersfound that over 40 percent of the patients who had undergone near-

death events had the experience we are trying to explain. This seemsto show that the NDE is a common clinical occurrence. However,this may be a hasty conclusion. Patients who have had an unusualexperience when on the verge of death might be more likely torespond to a questionnaire than patients not having had such an ex-perience, thus biasing the sample. A truly prospective investigation ofNDEs would have to take place within a given hospital where allresuscitated patients were asked, as a part of the routine examina-tion, whether or not they recalled any unusual experiences.

Special Problems in Trying to Assess NDEs

Near-death phenomena are not easy to assess impartially. Onereason is the emotional reactions they arouse. On the one hand,people disposed to believe in life after death may be inclined towardcredulity. On the other hand, those disposed to equate belief in sur-vival with outmoded superstition might be prone to avoid dealingwith the more challenging features of NDEs. Another reason is in-

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Toward an Explanation of Near-Death Phenomena

tellectual. The prevailing scientific orthodoxy tends in one way or

another to identify human beings with their physical organisms; this,in effect, logically rules out any meaningful concept of survival ofdeath. In short, the survival hypothesis, which is one possibleexplanation of NDEs, appears to be peculiarly resistant to rationaland scientific investigation.

Requirements for an Adequate Scientific Theory of NDEs

The first requirement for any scientific theory or hypothesis isthat it be consistent with all aspects of the phenomena being studied.But consistency by itself is not enough; more than one hypothesismay be consistent with the phenomena. It is also necessary to showthat competing hypotheses don't work. Further, the theory must beconsistent with the total system of knowledge. If this consistency isnot forthcoming, large-scale revisions in this system may be necessary.Finally, an adequate theory should enable us to predict new featuresand ramifications of the explicanda. Given these requirements, Idon't think we know enough about near-death phenomena to pro-vide a decisive theory or explanation. At most, we can take the first

step and try to see whether some of the explanations that havealready been proposed are consistent with the reported phenomena.

EXPLANATIONS OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

The Bipolar Model of Osis and Haraldsson

Using information from a pilot study (Osis, 1961), and othersources, Osis and Haraldsson constructed a model to predict patternsin deathbed phenomena; this model is a "bipolar" one which con-trasts two mutually exclusive hypotheses: survival and destruction.They then compared these two poles of explanation with relevantpatterns in the findings on deathbed visions from their cross-culturalsurveys of deathbed phenomena in the United States and India (Osisand Haraldsson, 1977a, 1977b). The patterns involved had to dowith the source and content of the visions, the influence on them ofvarious medical and psychological factors, and their variability ofcontent across individuals and cultures. Consider, for example, theinfluence of hallucinogenic factors; on the assumption of the survivalhypothesis, the authors predict that drugs known to cause hallucina-tions will not increase the frequency of survival-related visions, norwill other states in which contact with reality is weakened or absent.They also predict on the survival hypothesis that conditions knownto be incompatible with occurrence of ESP will decrease the fre-

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quency of such visions. Regarding this point, for instance, theauthors found that the majority of the reported deathbed hallucina-tions were visual and of short duration-which is the case in mostspontaneous ESP experiences. (Pathological hallucinations tend to beauditory.) And finally, they found that, unlike the case of pathologi-cal hallucinations, there was little variability in the content of death-bed visions across individuals and cultures, again a finding compatiblewith the survival hypothesis. The authors conclude that overall the"central tendencies" of their data are consistent with the survivalhypothesis of near-death experiences as they formulated it in theirbipolar model (Osis and Haraldsson, 1977a, p. 258).

Let us now look at several reductionistic explanations of near-death experiences, some of them engendered by criticisms of theOsis-Haraldsson work, and then proceed to a discussion of a non-reductionistic Jungian approach and the survival hypothesis in aneffort to understand these experiences.

Medical Factors

Drugs and sensory deprivation: The parapsychologist John Palmer(1978) has criticized the work of Osis and Haraldsson (1977a), whoin turn provided a lengthy rejoinder (1978). The main thrust ofPalmer's remarks is that certain baseline data are lacking in the studywhich invalidate the major conclusions, e.g., that medical factorssuch as drugs did not significantly influence the deathbed appari-tions. Osis and Haraldsson contend that they did take the relevantinformation into account in interpreting their data, and that thisinformation was derived from medical literature and the judgmentsof medically trained respondents. A major point made by Osis andHaraldsson in their response to Palmer is that the counter-survivalexplanation has to fit a special type of apparition-namely, the sur-vival-related apparition. It is not enough to say, for instance, thatdrugs produce hallucinations to explain away deathbed visions; youmust show that the kinds of hallucinations typically produced bydrugs fit the pattern of hallucinations occurring in the deathbedscenario. But this is no easy matter, for typical drug-producedhallucinations are not at all like typical near-death hallucinations.

Palmer points out (p. 394) that sensory deprivation and stress areknown to facilitate hallucinations. This is true. In a study of thepsychological aspects of cardiovascular disease, for example, Reiserand Bakst (1975, p. 637) speak of the "simultaneous sensory over-stimulation and monotony" prevailing in the hospital recovery roomor intensive care unit-conditions conducive to hallucinatory experi-

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Toward an Explanation of Near-Death Phenomena

ences. Three factors, however, clearly differentiate such hospital-induced hallucinations from NDEs. First, the former usually takeplace hours or days after the close brush with death, while the latterare reported by the patient as having occurred during the resuscita-tion procedures. Second, the post-operative effects in the first groupof patients consist largely of "confusion, disorientation, and misper-ceptions," while the hallucinations of the ND experients are oftenreported as vivid, detailed, and accompanied by feelings of joy. Andfinally, Kornfeld and Zimberg (1965) describe the behavior of pa-tients in the first group who "go berserk" and try to flee from themedical attendants; this type o behavior contrasts sharply with thefrequently reported near-death behavior of NDE patients who be-come angry when they are restored to normal consciousness.

Cerebral anoxia and temporal lobe seizures. In a review of Osis andHaraldsson's (1977b) At the Hour of Death, James F. McHarg (1978),a British psychiatrist, criticized the authors for failing to consider the"most important" (p. 886) explanation for their ND findings:cerebral anoxia (oxygen shortage in brain metabolism). Osis andHaraldsson (1979) reply that the main behavioral manifestations of

cerebral anoxia are anxiety, disorientation, and distortions of percep-tion. These are poor matches for the ND syndrome. Further, thereare reports (in Audette, 1979) of the extensive but hitherto unpub-lished work of Schoonmaker, a Denver cardiologist, who found casesof typical near-death experience in which cerebral anoxia wasdefinitely ruled out as a relevant factor.

McHarg also considers temporal lobe paroxysms (epileptic sei-zures) and cites three examples from his current clinical work.McHarg adds an important point: "A paranormal basis for the con-

tent of deathbed visions is not invalidated, however, by a medicalreason for their mere occurrence" (p. 886). But McHarg goes on to

suggest that what Osis and Haraldsson take to be survival-relatedfeatures of deathbed visions-e.g., seeing apparitions of the dead witha take-away purpose and feeling religious elation-are "rather typical[emphasis mine] of temporal lobe paroxysms." This, however, seemsto me an unverified exaggeration. There are actually a variety ofepilepsies with varied symptomology. Temporal lobe seizures arecommonly displayed in bizarre, explosive episodes (Elliot, 1966); forexample, a patient urinated into a fireplace, another climbed into awindow-display of pastries-unaware of what they were doing. Visual

aspects of seizures, unlike those of the classic NDE, consist of "dim-ness of vision, hemianopia [blindness in half of the visual field],blindness, crude flashes of light" (Elliot, 1966, p. 143). Furthermore,Schoonmaker (see Audette, 1979) is said to have collected to date 55

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cases in which resuscitated NDE patients displayed flat EEGs. Thisclashes with the idea of temporal lobe paroxysms since they consistof deviant patterns of electrical activity in the brain, not the absenceof such activity.

The temporal lobe is associated with memory, and seizures in thatarea often evoke memories. We are reminded of Penfield's (1975)experiments on electrostimulation of the temporal lobe whichevoked vivid memories in epileptic patients. Penfield, however,underlines the mechanical nature of these electro-resuscitations ofmemories; this, again, contrasts with the meaningful experience ofmeetin others in a transformative near-death experience.

Finally, what if some NDEs were accompanied by temporal lobeparoxysms? McHarg notes that such brain dysfunctions could con-ceivably facilitate paranormal experience. Perhaps McHarg's patients-those who were not near death-were catching glimpses of anotherworld. Why must transworld ESP occur, if it does occur, only amongthose who are near death? There might be other conditions of erup-tion into the "other" world-natural, spontaneous, or even deliber-ately inducible.

Religious Expectations

Palmer (1978, p. 395) thinks that dying patients who believe insurvival expect to be taken away by apparitions; hence their hallu-cinations may be generated by their expectations. But what aboutthe "no-consent" cases, in which the patient departs under protest?This seems to indicate an external agency. And there are also caseswhere the patient has no religious beliefs and expects nothing inparticular. On the whole, the empirical findings across the board sofar indicate that religious beliefs influence the interpretation, not thecontent, of experiences of this nature.

Even more problematic is Palmer's assumption that believers ex-pect a benign reception committee to greet them at the time ofdeath. Actually, there is plenty of evidence from religious pheno-menology indicating less sanguine anticipations. Christian and Hinduiconography and mythology are replete with intimations of post-mortem horrors; in both traditions there are many paintings,illustrated manuscripts, and icons which depict the moment of deathas a perilous passage, a frightful encounter with the forces of goodand evil. From a psychological point of view, religion seems to en-courage attitudes of collective guilt, enshrined in such doctrines asOriginal Sin. Certainly the ancient Greek Hades or the BabylonianKurniga (land of no return) did not suggest any blithe expectations.

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Toward an Explanation of Near-Death Phenomena

According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz, 1957),there is-as Moody, Ring, and others have found-a Being of Lightawaiting us at death; but the religious Being of Light is awe-inspiring,terrifying, and most of us cannot bear the thought of facing it.

The Epicureans of Graeco-Roman antiquity happily embraced aform of materialism whose chief charm was a promise of extinctionafter death. For the Epicureans this seemed an improvement over theanticipated terrors of the after-world. One could indeed make a goodcase or an irrational basis to the rise of modern materialism as aform of flight from the tyranny of priests and their infernal visionsof an after-life. The empirical picture, by and large, is more humane;happily, it clashes with the paranoid propensities of the religiousimagination. I want to bring this point out because certain explana-tions of ND phenomena arouse resistance among the more rigidlyrational types of modern man. There are historico-psychologicalreasons for this defensive armoring against everything "occult,""spiritual," or "supernatural."

Depersonalization

In one of their several papers on near-death experiences, Noyesand Kletti (1976) suggest a psychologically reductionistic explana-tion of the phenomena: that they are expressions of the "depersonali-zation syndrome" (feelings of unreality, emotional detachment,slowing of time, etc.). Let me begin with a comment on the title ofthis paper: "Depersonalization in the Face of Life-ThreateningDanger: A Description." This seems to indicate that the authors didnot set out to describe, but rather-as shown by the term "deper-sonalization" in the title-to place an interpretation on the phe-nomena. "Depersonalization" is hardly a descriptive term. Theauthors appear to have ruled out at the start any but a reductionisticexplanation. However, this explanation is forced; depersonalizationdoes not adequately characterize near-death phenomena. The maindifficulty is that the two types of experience have opposite affects:depersonalization tends toward a flattening affect and shrivelingmental capacities. It is essentially a negative phenomenon. In NDEs,on the other hand, we observe an opposite tendency towardheightened affect, expanded awareness, and a sense of profound andlasting significance.

In connection with one of their cases, Noyes and Kletti (1976)describe what they call the feeling of unreality. The subject reportedthat as she

went. deeper, reality vanished and visions, soft lights and an extreme

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feeling of calm acceptance passed over me like waves. . . . I was strongerbecause of being more whole, because I was no longer me as I had onceknown myself. I had a feeling of becoming part of a greater whole... (p. 22).

The authors are too hasty in forcing this vanishing of reality intothe pathological slot of the depersonalization syndrome. Their tacitassumption seems to be that any deviation from standard, everydayreality must be pathological. The possibility that what was involvedwas the loss of only one sense of reality, and that another sense ofreality was emerging does not seem to occur to Noyes and Kletti.The experience doesn't describe a loss in an exclusively negativesense; the loss also involved a gain, an opening into a larger reality. Infact, the enlarged sense of reality seems to have been in part a func-tion of the loss of personal identity in the narrow sense. The subjectseems not to have been depersonalized, but-more accurately-trans-personalized.

Schizoid Defense

Several psychologists have discussed the way the fear of deathgives rise to defensive belief-systems involving the notion of a souldistinct and separable from the body, and able to survive death.According to this way of thinking, belief in an immortal principle ofman is seen as a disguised alienation from the body-a schizoid solu-tion to the brutal problems of being human. R. D. Laing (1965) is noreductionist, but he has provided trenchant descriptions of the"unembodied self"; there is, according to Laing, an existential pro-cess whereby a person, in the face of the oppression and terrors ofexistence, retreats to his inner self and creates a private citadel safefrom the disasters of the external world.. Could this help us to ex-plain near-death experiences? Laing writes: "In this position the in-dividual experiences his self as being more or less divorced or de-tached from his body. The body is felt more as one object amongothers in the world than as the core of the individual's own being"(p. 69). This alienation from the body, which Laing sees as a strategyof desperation, tends to produce the schizoid personality. Schizo-phrenia, according to Laing, is only an extreme development of thisbasic defense strategy.

The schizoid tendency would be aggravated in a near-death crisis-and it is true that reports of NDEs are replete with accounts of al-terations of the patient's body image such as those Laing describes.But in his account of the schizoid process everything culminates insensations of inner deadness leading to a need to re-establish contactwith the external world. This is the reverse of the near-death process,where we typically observe an enlivening of affect along with a readi-

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ness to let go of the external world.

Narcissism, Denial of Death, and Freudian Reductionism

Few people have written more searchingly on the denial of deaththan the psychoanalyst, Otto Rank. In his collection of essays, TheDouble, Rank (1971) examines the widespread phenomenon of thedouble as it appears in literature, folklore, and anthropology. Theempirical cases that Rank looks at-e.g., those of de Maupassant andGoethe-are instances of autoscopy. In these, the percipient sees anapparition of himself in outer space. This, of course, is unlike thetypical out-of-body experience associated with a near-death crisis inwhich the perceiving consciousness seems to be located outside thebody. Nevertheless, Rank generalizes from the autoscopic phenomenaand chooses to see all constructs "of soul, higher worlds, and im-mortality" as projections of the narcissistic ego in the face of the "in-creasing reality-experience of man, who does not want to admit thatdeath is everlasting annihilation" (p. 84). Rank is uncompromising inhis Freudian reductionist judgment: "The idea of death therefore isdenied by a duplication of the self incorporated in the shadow or inthe reflected image." This makes short shrift of the highest humandreams. It is an outlook which inverts the classic Platonic formula:Plato's image-sensory world is now the really real world and therealm of ideas and ideals are reduced to images and shadows. Thanksto his commitment to Freudian dogma, Rank can speak confidentlyof "increasing reality-experience" as if the only real experiences weredefinable in terms of a single reality principle.

But there are two lines of reasoning that do not tally with Rank'sconclusions. First, he describes the personality characteristics ofthose who generate "double" phenomena; they seem to be narcis-sists-persons with pathological fixations on themselves. If this is so,then "double" phenomena ought to be proportional to narcissisticbehaviors. This is not an obviously true proposition. But we might beable to formulate such a claim in a testable way-for example, wecould predict that persons who have the most gratifying NDEs alsodisplay a significant frequency of narcissistic traits. At the moment,however, there is no evidence in support of such a relationship.

The second difficulty with Freudian reductionism is the veridicalpsi-component sometimes found in OBEs and NDEs. The psychiatristJan Ehrenwald (1978) follows Rank in claiming that OBEs "exhibitan assorted set of defenses and rationalizations aimed at warding offanxiety originating from the breakdown of the body image, from thethreatening split or disorganization of the ego, and, in the lastanalysis, from the fear of death as a universal experience" (p. 161).

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Anabiosis-The Journal for Near-Death Studies

Unlike Rank, however, Ehrenwald has thought and written a greatdeal about psi. He admits that some OBEs (and no doubt someNDEs) contain veridical information that strains the wish-fulfillinghypothesis; but this is not enough to persuade him that OBEs are notfundamentally delusive and the product of denial of death. As far asI can see, however, this is little more than the expression of a meta-physical dogma. After all, it is hard to see why, if an experience ismerely a subjective wish-fulfillment, it should contain any verifiable,objective information. Moreover, many persons who have had OBEsreport that their lives were significantly and permanently changed bythese experiences (see, e.g., Osis and McCormick, 1978); suchchanges are not what we would expect to result from narcissistic illu-sions. And there is still another point about OBEs which is at oddswith the Freudian interpretation. There are numerous cases in whichthe experient becomes frightened after finding himself out of thebody; the fear of death results from the experience itself and causesits sudden termination. Thus the fear of death seems to inhibit theexperience rather than give rise to it.

The Birth Experience

According to Stanislav Grof, a researcher into the therapeutic andtheoretical implications of psychoactive chemicals, subjects underthe influence of LSD often relive aspects of the birth process (Grofand Halifax, 1977). The contention-quite plausible, especially in thelight of Penfield's (1975) work on the neuro-electrical activation ofmemories-is that under special circumstances we may re-experiencethe agony of explusion from the amniotic sac of "oceanic bliss" into

the world of individual existence. For Grof these traumatic birthmemories have important therapeutic implications. He is not, how-ever, a Freudian reductionist; on the contrary, he has used nonspeci-fic chemical amplifiers of consciousness to enrich and enlarge the

cartography of inner space.Based on Grof's observations, the astronomer Carl Sagan (1979)

suggests an intriguing explanation of near-death experiences in hispopular tour of the wonderland of modern science, Broca's Brain. Heposes the problem effectively: "How could it be that people of allages, cultures and eschatological predispositions have the same sortof near-death experience?" (p. 302). Sagan speculates that the basisof near-death and mystical experiences is somehow "wired-in" (notethe characteristic mechanical type of metaphor) to the physiology ofthe human organism, and that drugs or other types of mechanismmight trigger and thus reactivate these experiences in the form of

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Toward an Explanation of Near-Death Phenomena

vivid hallucinations. Out-of-body experiences would be affectivereplays of ejection from the womb at birth. The tunnel effect re-ported so frequently in NDEs might represent a flashback to theprocess of exiting through the "tunnel" of the vagina. (It might, ofcourse, as well be seen as the psychic equivalent of the process ofexiting from the present dying body.) Sagan writes:

. . . every human being, without exception, has already shared an ex-perience like that of those travellers who return from the land of death:the sensation of flight, the emergence from darkness to light, an experi-ence in which, at least sometimes, a heroic figure can be dimly perceived,bathed in radiance and glory. There is only one common experience thatmatches this description. It is called birth (p. 304).

Sagan calls attention in this quotation to three important ideas.One is that we seem to be dealing with a basic mechanism of psycho-physiology. The second is that there is a fundamental analogy be-tween the birth process and the death process. And third is thatNDEs and mystical experiences are somehow structurally related.

However, the difficulty arises in seeing the NDE as nothing but anillusory psychophysiological reflex. At least we would require someevidence in support of the hypothesis; for instance, if Sagan is right,then people who had bad births-difficulties in the process of exitingthrough the birth canal, etc.-should not have benign near-death ex-periences. (And would those who come into the world by way ofCaesarean section be immune to NDEs?) Yet even if such connec-tions were established, nothing would follow concerning the "reality"of near-death episodes. Other factors need to be taken into consider-ation, such as the occurrence of veridical psi components. Further,the essential structures of birth and death experiences differ in thisway: birth moves from "amniotic bliss" to expulsion into thetraumatic light. The pattern in the near-death process is the reverse:

we begin with the pain and shock of the dying process, and then pro-ceed to experience a light which, however, is uniformly said to bewarm, loving, and gentle. If the near-death experience is a flashbackand replica of the birth experience, why this inconsistency? Theforms of the two processes are not analogous, as we would expect if

one were a flashback of the other. They seem in fact to be the re-verse of each other: being born into this world is painful and dyingout of it seems to be pleasant. It is clear that we are not yet anycloser to an adequate explanation of near-death experiences.

A NONREDUCTIONISTIC JUNGIAN APPROACH TONEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

Grof, from whom Sagan borrowed to formulate his hypothesis

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about NDEs, is a phenomenologist with Jungian leanings. Dataemerging from psychedelic research led him to validate Jung's con-cept of archetypes and their relation to the stream of our personalconsciousness. Grof, like Jung, was clearly not disposed to reducingthem to mere physiological epiphenomena. I would like to propose apossible Jungian explanation of near-death experiences. At the sametime, I believe that this approach will have to be supplemented byfindings from parapsychology.

The Archetype of Death

I shall make use of two assumptions from the field of Jungiananalytical psychology. The first assumption is that certain collectivepsychic structures-forms, ideas, archetypes, empirically substantia-ted by data from dreams and mythology-in some logically prior wayexist free from the limits of space and time. The archetypes representthe point of intersection between personal time and timeless trans-personal being. Jung (1968) himself put it this way:

The deepest we can reach in our exploration of the unconscious mind isthe layer where man is no longer a distinct individual, but where his mindwidens out and merges into the mind of mankind-not the conscious mind,but the unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the same (p. 46).

The second assumption is that the archetypes function to assistthe growth and evolution of the personality. Jung calls this process"individuation." The archetypes come into play especially duringmental emergencies, as automatic responses to crises of individua-tion. Jung (1971, p. 38) also stresses what he calls archetypes oftransformation, which involve "typical situations, places, ways andmeans, that symbolize the kind of transformation in question." Oneother immediately relevant thing to note is the ineffable, paradoxi-cal, and numinous nature of the archetypes.

Research on near-death experiences may be uncovering data whichempirically support the hypothesis of an "Idea" or "Archetype ofDeath"-a collective psychic structure whose function is to assist ahuman personality during a major crisis of individuation. Accordingto Jungian theory, such an archetype would represent and contain

the racial memory and wisdom of mankind. The collective experi-ence of the human race has come up with this as the best possible

way to die. The archetype is a paradigm-an old Platonic term-forhow to die. It is optimally functional for dying in the same way the

lung through evolution has become optimally functional for breath-

ing. Near-death phenomena point toward an archetype or paradigmfor a healthy death-a somewhat paradoxical expression, I admit.

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Toward an Explanation of Near-Death Phenomena

The advantage of this explanation is that it saves the important

subjective phenomena: the experience of ineffable unity, transcen-dental elation, and so forth. For, as Jung claims, the archetypes aremerging phenomena with numinous overtones. It also accounts forthe transformative effects of NDEs, which seem to involve releasefrom the limitations of ordinary, space-time bound individual exis-tence. Yet there remain two thorny problems for the hypothesis of adeath archetype. First, what is the fate of personal consciousness inthis archetypal transformation of death? Second, what are we tomake of the psi components of NDEs? The genuine paranormaleffects obviously occur in a specifiable space-time framework andseem to involve awareness of particular deceased individuals.

According to the theory of archetypes, superpersonal structures"survive" death partly because they never undergo birth the wayindividual bodies do. Before John Jones was, the archetypes are. Butwhat happens (in this Platonic-Jungian atemporal world) to thepersonal consciousness of John Jones? Some of the testimony fromnear-death cases indicates that the unique personality survives, forwhat the experients often claim they "see" are apparitions of recog-nizable, unique beings. Of course, this is not all; other things are also"seen," sensed as amorphous presences, or otherwise "perceived" asmythic forms. In the world glimpsed by dying patients, personal andtranspersonal elements apparently co-exist. The near-death experi-ence, like the Jungian archetype, is full of paradox. It strains thelimits of our normal conceptual apparatus, as if it would in some wayboth unite and dissolve opposites.

The facts seem to support a paradoxical explanation of the fate ofthe individual. The description from Noyes and Kletti (1976) that Iquoted above bears repeating: ". . . I was no longer me as I had onceknown myself. I had a feeling of becoming part of a greater whole."This speaks of a transformation of personal identity. There aredifferent ways of describing this fundamental experience. Some callit the highest quest of the mystic, others regression to the magicalomnipotence of primary narcissism. How shall we decide whichinterpretation to place upon this basic phenomenon of transcendence?This brings us once again to the paranormal factor in NDEs.

The Psi Component

The reductionist has neat and coherent schemes for digesting thedreams of artists and the visions of mystics and dying persons. But itis no easy matter for them to swallow such puzzling fish as ESP andPK. It is the psi component in near-death experiences that stands

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squarely in the way of reducing them to being mere illusions.But having said this, we must also consider the explanation offered

by parapsychologists who have a leaning toward reductionism. Theywould claim that if we combine the known paranormal powers ofembodied minds with a basically Freudian metaphysics, we canaccount for near-death phenomena and still reject the survivalhypothesis. Suppose a dying patient experiences a veridical appari-tion of a relative who died before the patient was born, precognizesin detail some unusual future event, or provides a verifiable report ofbeing out of the body. Why, these parapsychologists ask, can't wesay that this is merely an example of the patient's psi operating inthe service of a regressive tendency toward wish-fulfillment? In fact,there is hardly anything, no matter how remote from "ordinary"reality, that they do not ascribe to the supposed infinite psi-potentialof the living human being. This "super-ESP" hypothesis (Gauld,1961), as it is called, has been aptly characterized by Osis (1979) as"that strange invention which shies like a mouse from being tested inthe laboratory but, in rampant speculations, acts like a ferocious liondevouring the survival evidence" (p. 31).

Moreover, as other parapsychologists have argued, if such extra-ordinary paranormal abilities exist in human beings, then it seemsplausible to take the next step and consider the possibility of survival.In short, the super-ESP hypothesis is self-canceling, for the moreeffectively it argues for fantastic powers of the living mind, the lessimplausible-in fact, the more probable-it seems that there is anelement of human personality capable of surviving after death.

THE SURVIVAL HYPOTHESIS

The immediate attraction of the survival hypothesis is its consis-tency with the beliefs of almost all those who have had the classicnear-death experience. Ring (1980), for example, found a "hugeeffect" here. Although those having the experience were found to beless inclined to believe in survival to start with, as compared to non-experiencers, they were much more likely to believe in it afterwards.Thus, as Ring points out, it is not merely "coming close to death thattends to convince one that there is life after death; it is . .. the experi-ence itself that proves decisive. The testimony here is unambiguous"(p. 169). Of course, since the claims of these experients, particularlythose about the nature of the after-death world, are not publiclyverifiable, we cannot consider them as "proof" of survival. But amass of such accounts with congruent claims must, after a criticalpoint, begin to count as a special consensus. Is it possible that those

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Toward an Explanation of Near-Death Phenomena

who come closest to experiencing death know by acquaintance moreabout it than the rest of us do?

Needless to say, this will not do for the skeptic. Belief in life afterdeath is unpopular among most intellectuals today. One reason forthis is that there are supposedly good a priori arguments against theconceivability of survival. An excellent discussion of this problemfrom a philosophical point of view is offered by H. D. Lewis (1978)in Persons and Life After Death. The prevailing conception of theperson derives from modern physicalism, the ruling philosophy thatsees everything mental as ultimately reducible to physical states. Yetthe major tendency of parapsychological research is to upset the pre-tensions of physicalism. Indeed, some able persons have persuasivelyargued the case for the impossibility of reducing psi phenomena tophysical principles (see, e.g., Beloff, 1980). This is a problem that re-quires full discussion. I will only remark here that the more unlikelyit becomes that psi can be explained in terms of physical principles,the more intrinsically plausible the survival hypothesis becomes.

An evaluation of the survivalist explanation of near-death phe-nomena demands a full account of other types of evidence for sur-vival, such as mediumistic communications, veridical apparitions ofthe deceased, and reincarnation memories. Explaining NDEs is ob-viously a large undertaking. The most that can be said now is thatthey cannot be adequately accounted for by any of the reductionisttheories, but that to invoke either Jungian or outright survivalhypotheses would be premature. To embrace such non-reductionisticexplanations is to commit oneself to far-reaching revisions of thegeneral nature of things. One desires more solid ground from whichto make such transcendent leaps. In the light of the facts, one isentitled to abstain from final judgment and rest in the skepticalattitude-but this means with regard to the pronouncements ofphysicalism as well as to the claims of the survivalists. One is ren-dered free-in a Jamesian, pragmatic way-to accept the survivalhypothesis, for such a belief is consistent with near-death phenomena.But the great question of who we are and what our fate is after deathis still open. We may be on the threshold of new discoveries. Whetherwe advance or whether we stagnate in indifference will depend uponthe courage and collaboration of many-both hard-headed scientistsand students of the humanities.

NOTES

1. This paper is scheduled to appear in a book edited by Dr. Craig

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Lundahl: A Collection of Near-Death Research Readings. Chicago:Nelson-Hall, in press.

2. This article is reprinted here through the kind permission of theauthor and Mrs. Laura A. Dale, editor of The Journal of the Amer-ican Society for Psychical Research, where Dr. Grosso's paper wasoriginally published.

3. This example is taken from a tape recording of a lecture given byDr. Sabom at the Psychical Research Foundation (Sabom, 1980;see also Sabom and Kreutziger, 1978).

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Requests for reprints to:Michael Grosso1422 River RoadEdgewater, New Jersey 07020

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